Having my own fun with Google Trends
August 12th, 2006
Drawing some inspiration from a post on O’Reilly Radar, I thought it would be interesting to use Google Trends to look at a few different comparisons between organizations in our community and important phenomena influencing the way we do our work. Here are the few I tried out:
- AARP & blogs
- ASAE & MySpace (ASAE & The Center and MySpace didn’t return sufficient results to create a graph)
- National Rifle Association & Google
None of these patterns looks that exciting for the associations. On the other hand, here’s a comparison between AAA and podcasting that looks very strong for the organization, even with the stray reference to Class AAA softball.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Google Trends, here is an explanation of what each of these pages is showing you, taken directly from the About Google Trends page:
Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results — our search-volume graph — plotted on a linear scale.
Located just beneath our search-volume graph is our news-reference-volume graph. This graph shows you the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories. When Google Trends detects a spike in the volume of news stories for a particular term, it labels the graph and displays the headline of an automatically selected Google News story written near the time of that spike. Currently, only English-language headlines are displayed, but we hope to support non-English headlines in the future.
Below the search and news volume graphs, Google Trends displays the top cities, regions, and languages for the first term you entered.
Rather than suggest what I think these comparisons mean, I invite you to respond to the poll below so you can share your perspective. I look forward to your responses!
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Entry Filed under: Principled Innovation Blog, What's New?, Social Media, Innovation, Associations, Extreme Makeover, The Association Innovator, We Have Always Done It That Way
Ben Martin and P.I.
Association exec Ben Martin, CAE is P.I.’s Architect of Participation. Jeff and Ben help clients harness the power of the Web through the strategic application of social tools.
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